Wednesday, 27 April 2016

Only 6 weeks before departure.

What is left in the “to do” pile? The bikes still need few
bits but they should be ready by end of next week.

The Bikes:

After a lot of research done by Alistair, they are now
fitted with new tyres (Heidenau K 60). We expect those will last the entire
trip. They have a reputation for that. They also have heavy duty inner tubes. That
includes my back wheel that came “tubeless”. We could not find an adequate tubeless
tyre that could fit. Remember, my XT250 is grey import from Japan. Very rare in
the UK.

The bikes should be ready by end of next week.

The House and Dog:

The house and dog are pretty much sorted. After some research,
few months ago, I joined a website called www.trustedhousesitters.com. You
have to pay for joining but it matches home and pet owners with people willing
to do the house and pet sitting, usually for free! It seems lots of semi-retired
couples are very happy to just go from home to home and country to country, looking
after pets and enjoying a free stay in someone else house. So there, something
for us to do when we retire maybe!

After discussing with few, very good applicants, we picked a
nice retired English couple and they will stay in the house with the dog. It
was amazing how quickly I got applications from people all over the world,
within an hour of putting my house/dog in the site. With all that sorted, we
just need to tidy the house, finish the bikes and pack. Vaccinations are all
still valid, including the Tick Borne encephalitis, so no need for any jabs
this year.

The border permits:

I contacted a travel agency in the Altai to get our border
permits sorted. In Russia, if you are a foreigner, you need a special permit to wander near the borders
(unless main roads to a specific border crossing). That includes between 30 to
50km from any border! The permit is free but not speaking much Russian and not
being able to phone the FSB in Russia (ex-KGB!) I am hoping the travel agency
can put the request for us. It takes 60 days to process it. With our intention
to follow a track across the Altai and Tuva, along the border with Mongolia, we
need that permit. If we got caught without a permit we could get in big
trouble.

Itinerary:

I have been spending time investigating our itinerary. My
route is fairly set in large lines, depending on weather and road conditions.

However, there
are some serious inconsistencies
from map to map (Russian vs German maps!) and paper maps versus Google Map and
Google Earth! This is mainly to cross from the Ural region (Syktyvkar / Ukhta) to
Khanty-Mansiysk and Surgut (Siberia)! That big area is very vague and each map
shows different roads existing, not existing etc…. I guess we will need to find out once we get
there. I suspect that some roads in Google may only be winter roads (i.e. Ice
roads) and only a swamp in the summer time. However, the Russian maps say some
are all season roads! Time will tell.

One of the main difficulty is the scale of such maps. Russia
covers half the planet! Russia is 17m square kilometres (Canada 9.9m, USA 9.8m)
Europe is 3.9m!

If we compare with France, the biggest country in Europe, vs
Russia, France is…. 249,000 kms….. 70 time
smaller…. Imagine crossing France 70 times…. Ok we won’t cross ALL of Russia,
but still a big chunk. So, road maps are rather unreliable! No worries, we will
get somewhere eventually, even if not where originally intended :D